"Meet the new ThinkPad X131e Chromebook: A fast booting, highly customizable laptop PC built with rugged features for the daily rigors of K-12 education. The ThinkPad X131e Chromebook simplifies software and security management for school administrators and provides students and teachers with quick access to thousands of apps, education resources and storage." Lenovo is the third OEM to jump into ChromeOS. Chromebooks have been doing well on Amazon, apparently, too. Android tablets, iPads, the Mac, and now Chromebooks - it must be rainy in Redmond.

You're asking this about Google, a company who's primary source of revenue comes from ads? Ads that result from Google analyzing your search activity, your email, your documents, your music (if you use that service), etc? Wow, how could they possibly be spying on you?

Ads that result from Google analyzing your search activity, your email, your documents, your music (if you use that service), etc? Wow, how could they possibly be spying on you?

Obviously they will use information gathered when using their services to present you as a data point against advertisers, I'd say every 'free' service does this, including Bing, just read the end user agreements of these type of services.

Is this what you describe as 'spying'? Because it's not exactly a covert operation, it's kind of common knowledge that when you enter something in a search engine, this will be logged as a statistic together with any other data they have gathered on you, in a web search that would be your browser, operating system, screen resolution, etc, and likely identified through a cookie and thus combined with other searches belonging to the same cookie, ie you.

This is what all these services sell, Google/Bing/Facebook etc, a ball of data consisting of your online interests and habits which is sought after by advertisers.

If I already use Google's services I can't see how I would be more 'spied upon' with ChromeOS than I am now. And I certainly doubt I would be less 'spied upon' by using alternate 'free' services, the same data gathering goes on everywhere.

It's up to you to decide if you think the services offered are worth having your online habits be used for targeted advertising, one way or another you will have to pay for using these services, as it is now you are paying by being a data point for sale.

Google doesn't need to spy on you on the OS level. Google does just one thing: provide you with an easier way to get on to the Internet. And once you're there, it's hard to miss sites, that somehow use Google AdWords or some other Google Product, even if you are not directly using GMail or other Google services. That's also the case with Android: You can get vanilla Android for free (actually it's not even legal to bundle selfmade Android distributions with Google Services). All Google needs to do is to give folks web access, this will ensure their income.

But what have people actually agreed to? For example, all the information collected by AOL search allowed researchers to track down specific people. Can we actually say that people know what they're agreeing to in this age of one-sided* 100 page EULAs?